Monthly Archives: June 2018

Flatpak

There is now a nightly flatpak for Shotwell available. You can use this flatpakref for installation. To protect your database, it will work on its own private database. If you really want to work with your current data, I have described a way to make it access your normal Shotwell database in this comment on issue 6. The upcoming unstable flatpak as well as any potentially stable flatpaks on flathub will have the access enabled by default, though.

The nice benefit of the flatpak is that you will have access to the latest versions on Ubuntu 16.04 again. In fact that’s how all the screenshots below were done.

A note to snap enthusiasts: There is some preliminary work available at https://github.com/phako/shotwell-snap (not from me, I just made a minor fix) which unfortunately I could not even convince to compile anymore. If anyone wants to pick up from there, you are definitely welcome to do so!

Features

Theming

If you have run an unstable version or GIT version of Shotwell you might notice that it looks different:

Shotwell with dark theme

Yes, there is a dark theme variant now. If you don’t like it, you may switch it back to the light theme in settings.

Shotwell with bright theme

Extended information

Working with the extended information panel was always somewhat awkward in the past with the extra window floating on top, sometimes not even showing anything because it was opened before selecting something, staying at its minimum size etc. The extended information panel was reworked to sit in the sidebar now:

Face detection

Face detection is available in the main line again. I have merged it to master after Ricardo took the code and massaged it to apply again after recent Shotwell changes.

Due to the persisting issues, main one is that it has slightly bad UX, it is disabled by default currently. The flatpak has it enabled, if you want to check it out yourself, use -Dface-detection=true when calling meson.

There is work going on to improve the user experience of the face detection as well as improving the face detection itself. I am really looking forward to the outcome.

Facebook integration

Facebook integration will likely cease to work August 1st, 2018. This is due to the recent changes in the graph API. The current permission Shotwell uses to upload images is no longer supported. I think that I will not have the time to fix this in time for the API shutdown. Sorry about that.